Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Antiquarian Book News

Birmingham NEC

Three
rare books, showcased by a York book dealer, are to be offered for sale for
thousands of pounds next week. The books, which are all signed and collectively
valued at more than £22,000, include a collection of Beatles photos valued at
£3,750. Containing 12 black and white photographic prints , the
concertina-bound ‘Pixerama Foldbook’ was signed with kisses by John Lennon and
George Harrison at the stage door of the Nottingham Odeon cinema on December
12, 1963 which was the penultimate night of The Beatles’ 1963 autumn tour.

Also on sale at the Antiques For Everyone Summer Fair in Birmingham next week,
is a first edition copy of The
Colossus and Other Poems by American poet and novelist Sylvia
Plath, valued at £17,500, which was presented to Plath’s friend and neighbour
Winifred Davies.

Also an original version of 1945’s Ross
Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall 1783-1787, by Winston Graham, signed
by the author and the cast of the original 1975 BBC television series, is also
up for sale. Actors who have signed the first edition book include Robin Ellis,
Angharad Rees, Jane Wymark and Norma Streader, and it has been valued at
£1,250, just in time for the new series of the latest BBC incarnation to return
to the nation’s screens in the autumn.

The antique show will take place at the Birmingham NEC between July 21 and 24.
To find out more about the show, go to www.antiquesforeveryone.co.uk

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Shelley at Cambridge

On
July 23, 1816, poet and political agitator Percy Shelley checked into the Hôtel
de Londres in Chamonix, near the Swiss border, with his wife Mary, and close
friend Lord Byron.

When Shelley signed into the hotel he wrote that he was coming from England and
going to 'L'Enfer', or hell – a declaration which sent shockwaves through
respected religious society.

A huge volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies a year previously had changed
the weather patterns around the world, contributing to food shortages and
riots. In order to endure the incessant rain and dark skies in the Alps during
that summer, Shelley’s party competed to write the scariest ghost story, with
Mary Shelley inspired to produce the first draft of Frankenstein. Her husband conceived one of
his most famous works, Mont
Blanc, which explores human beings’ place in the universe and
confronts the notion of religious certainty.

The entry made by Shelley in the visitors’ book was meant to be offensive, and
many subsequent visitors, including his distant relatives, Sir John and Lady
Shelley, found it so. The page had been removed from the visitors’ book by the
late summer of 1825, three years after Shelley had drowned in the Bay of
Spezia, a month before his 30th birthday. The manuscript was apparently lost.

The page was found pasted into Shelley’s copy of his poem, The Revolt of Islam, which
addresses revolutionary politics and the long history of the nineteenth century
through an elaborate mythological narrative. This book, with a first edition of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
is on public view in the Cambridge College’s Wren Library.

The library, which also holds rare first editions by Isaac Newton, AA Milne’s
original Winnie the Pooh
manuscripts and early Shakespeare editions, is open to visitors from 12 to 2pm,
Monday to Friday.

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Little ‘monkeys’

The
margins of a medieval manuscript have revealed a set of children’s doodles. The
discovery sheds new light on the knowledge and education of children in the
Middle Ages and their similarities to children of today.

A report recently published in the journal ‘Cogent Arts & Humanities’,
described the 14th-century book from a Franciscan convent in Naples as “the
work of mischievous little kids.” According to Deborah Thorpe, an author of the
study, the drawings were discovered by chance while researching an unrelated
project. As an expert of the medieval manuscripts from the University of York
in Canada, she believes that the drawings depict a human, a cow or horse and
some kind of demon or devil. Researchers concluded that the drawings were
likely to have been made by children between the ages of 4 and 6 years old.

There are later examples of the historical children’s drawings, but Thorpe
believes that this is the first time that children’s drawings in medieval books
have been classified as the work of children with the use of a set of
psychological criteria. It shows that children enjoyed playing and